It is better for the environment to buy locally grown food, even if it is not organic, than organic food that's been transported over 200 miles.

Yeah, but I just can't find locally grown bananas. :(

If everyone bought organic, human beings would starve. In around 1920, the population of humans on earth got to the point where nature no longer fixed enough nitrogen to grow foods for everyone, so chemically fixed nitrogen fertilizer was invented. A small organic farmer can produce some food with just the natural amound of fixed nitrogen, but there isn't enough arible soil on earth to feed everyone on earth right now, organically.

Additionally, organic has no legal definition in this country (USA), Hostess could call twinkees organic if they so chose and no one could challenge that claim legally.

And, on a third note, the vast majority of corn and grains consumed in the world are genetically engineered varieties. This permits more weight in food per acre of land to be produced, and alters the ability of the food to grow (in favorable ways) in various climes alien to the original stock.

So organic growing starves people, but knowing that, have a nice day and continue to pay 6 bucks a pound for your grapes.

Organic food puts fewer pesticides into the environment. Also, I considered genetically modified (or selectively bred) to be very different issues I'm all for genetic tampering to create more food.

I'm also for increasing the fertility of the soil (see terra preta).

But I'm also for putting fewer poisons into the environment. I can't weigh the dangers of pesticides versus transport, so I have no opinion. But local food grown organically can help. I do think growing enough food should take priority, but it's not an inherent obstacle, merely a temporary one.

I also very much like hydroponics.

This might seem true at first sight. But let’s look at it more deeply: If this claim were true, transported food could never be cheaper than locally grown food.

The fact that local fodd isn’t cheaper though means, amongst other things, that the cost of living in our parts of the world is much higher compared to food exporting countries - which again is because you own a car, you drive a car, you have a PC, you connect it to the internet, etc., and people in "poorer" countries don’t. All these activities consume resources and energy; which are finally included in the price, and that is why prices for local products are much higher, and it might be cheaper to import food even though it’s travelled around the globe.

So, in fact the exact opposite is true: if you want to save energy, buy foreign food. It can also help poorer people raise their living standards and/or invest in technology that is more environment friendly (like buy a new car instead of an old one, etc).

A.

We were not talking about price, but environmental effects. Most environmental effects aren't factored into the price. The cost of transport is, the pollution caused by transport is not. The cost of pesticides is, the damage caused by pesticides is not, etc.

So, would you agree that using less oil and pesticide causes less "environmental effects" - say, no oil and no pesticides?

Would you agree, assuming the store doesn’t lose money, that oil and pesticide prices are included in your purchase price?

I’m not saying that the price includes the "damage", that why I said "amongst other things".

I’m going back to the origin of the problem and ask how much resources something consumes. No resource consumption in the first place means no damage afterwards, right?

So, say there are two products of similar quality, like Tomatoes from your neighbor’s backyard for $1 a piece and Tomatoes from Argentina for $0.50 a piece. In this case, Argentina clearly wins in terms of resource consumption in the whole supply chain.

One could say that their prices are so low because Argentinian worker’s earn less money. That may be right, but it doesn’t - and can’t mean - that the local offer is better for the environment. Oil prices are the same worldwide, and a lower product price still means that there must be less resources in the production process.

Less worker’s income also means that they are less likely to own, say, a PS2 that uses power and oil to produce, oil to ship from Japan to Argentina, and it needs electricity to operate; it needs a TV set, too...

A.

I don't consider the environmental effects of people not dying to be harmful effects that I want to decrease, so if the fruit from Argentina is cheaper because the workers don't get enough money to get proper medical care for their kids, then I don't count that as a benefit.

Yes, less resource use is a benefit, but we aren't talking about the option to use the lemons and oranges I grow in my backyard with neither pesticides nor need for transport. Obviously, that is my most environmentally friendly choice for lemons and oranges. But when I want to buy bananas, it gets more complicated, and we have to compare pesiticide use versus oil use.

The cost of the pesticide and the oil are factored in, but prices are not set based on the harmfulness to the environment. DDT might well be cheap, while it causes baby bats to be eaten alive. That cost is not factored into the purchase of your food. So, cost alone doesn't indicate much.

Seriously, don't make me tell you the story of The Baby Bat and the DDT. I had to learn about it in college, and it's incredibly awful.

Why is the environment buying food?

Does it carry small change?

DDT is a "good" example how misguided "environmentalism" costs the lifes - and lifetime - of millions: the ban of DDT kills 800,000 African children each year who die of malaria.

http://www.mises.org/story/2236

Wow, that's shocking... that article says that DDT is completely safe and there's no reason not to use it and everybody just stopped out of unfounded fear. I am suspicious of conspiracy theories.

So, some research:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/07/05_ddt.shtml
Pregnant women exposed to DDT have babies with developmental delays

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11557181&dopt=Citation
if they have them at all, since it seems linked to spontaneous abortions

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7437/447
DDT exposure is cumulative, which makes it more dangerous.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=12842376&dopt=Abstract
The daughters of mothers exposed to DDT while pregnant become less fertile

While the currently studied health problems may not be sufficient to make banning it the right choice, it certainly isn't as simple as it's harmless yet was banned. It needs to have a careful cost-benefit analysis done, along with some of the other potential side effects being more studied.

The studies mentioned in that article do not talk about the effect of it on babies whose mothers were exposed while pregnant, which is generally going to be the biggest danger with a toxin, since during development you are most affected by things that cause mutations/birth defects.

http://jyte.com/cl/if-someone-wants-to-do-something-and-it-isnt-hurting-you-dont-be-a-fucking-dick

I'm not clear on how that claim is relevant to this discussion.